Southern Christian Leadership Conference

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 252

As a principal organization of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) championed the use of nonviolent direct action to end legal and social discrimination against African Americans. Identified strongly with its original leader, the Reverend MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., the SCLC organized and sponsored many protest marches and demonstrations during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Although the group's influence declined after King's assassination in 1968, the SCLC continues to work for the betterment of the lives of African Americans.

The SCLC emerged in the wake of a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, by the city's black citizens in 1955, which had led to a December 1956 Supreme Court ruling upholding the desegregation of those buses (Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903, 77 S. Ct. 145, 1 L. Ed. 2d 114). Prodded by African American social activist Bayard Rustin, who hoped to carry the Montgomery victory to the rest of the South, King and other clerics formed the Southern Negro Leaders Conference, forerunner of the SCLC, during a meeting in Atlanta in January 1957. King?who had gained national renown through his role as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organizer of the bus boycott?was a natural choice to lead the group. Other early SCLC leaders included the Reverends Ralph D. Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. Later in 1957, the group changed its name to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The SCLC hoped to initiate Gandhian, nonviolent direct action throughout the South. It hoped that such action would secure racial desegregation, voting rights, and other gains for African Americans. Through this approach, the SCLC sought to take the CIVIL RIGHTS cause out of the courtroom and into the community, hoping to negotiate directly with whites for social change. As one of its first actions, the group led the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., which drew an estimated twenty-five thousand people. In 1959, it organized a youth march on Washington, D.C., that attracted forty thousand people.

Despite these successful marches, the SCLC was hampered by disorganization during its early years. It experienced difficulty in meeting many of its major goals during the late 1950s, particularly in voter registration. It charted a new course in the early 1960s, when it recruited leaders such as the Reverends Wyatt T. Walker and...